Live mealworms in the nickle dime

DJ here. In the last brief update, I noted that we might lose the current chicks as we did the last batch, because we didn't have many soft insects to feed them and their parents didn't seem to be finding many, perhaps due to the relatively low rainfall lately.  The freeze-dried chinese mealworms that I boil to make them edible are apparently not edible by young chicks, although they love them a week or so after they fledge.

So I had put in an order on Sunday for some live mealworms from an east coast state, but figured the chicks might not survive until they arrived, supposedly Saturday at the earliest, just regular first-class parcel which was how the seller rolled. So I was glad to see, when checking with the USPS website, that they were out for delivery today - wednesday - which is pretty darn quick shipping since I ordered them on Sunday night.

Once the birds tumbled to the fact that I had a better class of worms, they set up a constant relay taking them to the chicks. There must still be at least two surviving because I don't think one could have eaten that much, unless it's enormous. So perhaps we'll see some "cuties" or perhaps we'll come up with a different name. Sue recommends cuties.

blog entries are better with pix. Here's Cheepy typing a memo

As I've obliquely mentioned before, I no longer make efforts to go down and win the chicks' familiarity a few days after fledging by exchanging whistles and gradually getting them used to me; the parent birds will bring them up and introduce them soon enough... so the little critters in the nesting box don't know it, but they're already fated to be our good friends until their parents chase them off.

This is another slow-brain day for me, so I'll describe just a bit more of how I used to get to know the chicks, back with the broods of 2019. Surprisingly, it was not food-based. Rather, my ears quickly learned the single-note location whistles of baby shamas and attuned to those, so just by walking in the yard I could tell roughly where they were if they were whistling. If they weren't, I'd wait. What I found was that if I echoed their whistles with a similar whistle a second after they spoke, they'd get into sort of a dueling-banjo's cadence with me with whistle and counter-whistle becoming nearly constant instead of the solo whistles a chick will normally put out every 30-60 seconds. This will work with multiple chicks at once.

The surprising thing is that doing this will cause the little fluffy non-aerodynamic spheroids to actually approach me. So after doing this for 15 minutes or so, the baby shamas would have often moved to within 4 or so feet of me, the better to whistle back and forth. I guess no predators ever bothered to figure out this flaw in their survival coding, but it causes me to reflect on the fact that as hunter-gatherers our ancestors had brains about 20% larger than ours, and they probably knew all sorts of stuff like that, if I can so quickly learn such behaviors by observation and experiment. In many ways that would have been a richer way to live I think. Anyhow, I don't do that now because the mosquitoes eat me alive while I'm doing it, and I never did learn to tolerate slathering toxins on my skin to deter them. So I don't go about winning their acceptance the hard way, which was necessary when Bird still warned them away from me with razzberry monster calls and postures. Now he just drops them off with me like I'm his daycare staff and goes off to do Bird stuff.

here's Chickie sharing a meal with us in the kitchen

I'll throw in a couple of unrelated photos because it breaks up the text nicely; we haven't discussed Cheepy and Chickie much yet; most of the chicks leave after 4-6 weeks, but some hang around longer and graduate from having a brood name like "chicklet3" to a given name like Chickie. Cheepy - originally cheepy1 - hung out longest and got into full adult male plumage, lasting here for 7 months or so and spending some time in the house every day. Chickie hung around for about 4 months and by the time she went off to conquer the world she was mostly in adult-female plumage. The Cheepies were the 3rd nesting of 2019 and the Chicklets the 4th, so Chickie was about 6 weeks younger than Cheepy. Both of them spent significant time as indoor birds by choice; Cheepy since he was sort of "slow" and needed help, and Chickie just because. You'll see more of them going forward, though I doubt we'll see more of them... they've both departed now.